History

Ethnologue was founded by Richard S. Pittman, who was motivated by the desire to share information on the state of Bible translation around the world with his colleagues as well as with other language researchers.

The first edition in 1951 was 10 mimeographed pages and included information on 46 languages or groups of languages. Hand-drawn maps were included for the first time in the fourth edition (1953). The publication transitioned from mimeographed pages to a book in the fifth edition (1958). Dr. Pittman continued to expand his research through the seventh edition (1969), which listed 4,493 languages.

In 1971 Barbara F. Grimes became editor. She had assisted with Ethnologue since the fourth edition (1953) and took on the role of research editor in 1967 for the seventh edition (1969). She continued as editor from the eighth through the fourteenth editions (2000). In 1971 the scope of Ethnologue was expanded from primarily minority languages to encompass all known languages of the world. Between 1967 and 1973 Grimes completed an in-depth revision of the information on Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and a few countries of Asia. During her years as editor, the number of identified languages grew from 4,493 to 6,809 and the information about each language expanded so that the published work more than tripled in size.

In 2000 Raymond G. Gordon, Jr. became the third General Editor of Ethnologue and produced the fifteenth edition (2005). At the same time, Gary F. Simons became the Executive Editor, taking on overall responsibility for guiding the production of Ethnologue both online and in print. Shortly after the publication of the fifteenth edition, M. Paul Lewis became the General Editor and served in that role through the nineteenth edition (2016). The editorial team was expanded in 2010 with the addition of Charles D. Fennig as Managing Editor who served in that role for 15 years. In 2018 Lewis was succeeded by David M. Eberhard as General Editor, and in 2025 Fennig was succeeded by Alison J. Robinson as Managing Editor.

Database

The published data are generated from a computerized database on languages of the world first created in 1971 by then consulting editor, Joseph Grimes, from the typesetting tapes for the seventh edition (1969). The work was done at the University of Oklahoma under a grant from the National Science Foundation. In 1974 the database was moved to a computer at Cornell University where Dr. Grimes was professor of linguistics, and it was then moved to a personal computer in 1979. Since 2000 the database has been maintained at the headquarters of SIL Global in Dallas, Texas. A significant milestone in 2013 was the development of the Ethnologue Global Dataset as a new product; it makes a subset of the database available to researchers in tabular form. The structure of the database continues to develop to meet the ongoing research needs of the Ethnologue user community. The fact that language entries are largely constructed from the database by software accounts for a certain stiffness or redundancy in the phrasing.

Online presence

The seventeenth edition marked a major milestone in the history of Ethnologue. Previously, the primary product had been a printed book. Beginning in 1997 with the thirteenth edition, the complete contents of the book were also shared online. However, with the seventeenth edition, Ethnologue shifted to a web-centric paradigm in which the website is the primary means by which Ethnologue database contents are accessed. The web edition stands at the center of a whole family of more-focused derivative digital and print products that are updated annually. The seventeenth edition was initially released to the web in 2013, with a revision of that same edition appearing both on the web and in other formats (including print) in 2014. In 2015 a new Online System for Collaboration and Research (OSCAR) was developed and launched. This browser-based tool makes it possible for specially-trained collaboraters from around the world to enter updates directly into the database. In 2019 an open Contributor Program was launched as a feature of the public website. It allows registered uses to post proposed updates to specific language and country pages; these users accumulate credit toward on-going complimentary access as their proposed changes are vetted by the editors and entered into the database.

ISO codes

One feature of the database since its inception has been a system of three-letter language identifiers. The codes were first published with the following explanation in a monograph reporting the results of the grant to create the database:

Each language is given a three-letter code on the order of international airport codes. This aids in equating languages across national boundaries, where the same language may be called by different names, and in distinguishing different languages called by the same name. (Grimes 1974:i)

While the codes were used behind the scenes in the database that generated the eighth and ninth editions, it was not until the tenth edition (1984) that they appeared in the publication itself.

In 1998, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted ISO 639-2, a standard for three-letter language identifiers. It is based on a convergence of ISO 639-1 (an earlier standard for two-letter language identifiers originally adopted in 1967) and of ANSI Z39.53 (also known as the MARC language codes, a set of three-letter identifiers developed within the library community and adopted as an American National Standard in 1987). The ISO 639-2 standard was insufficient for many purposes since it has identifiers for fewer than 400 individual languages. Thus in 2002, ISO TC37/SC2 formally invited SIL International to prepare a new standard that would reconcile the complete set of codes used in Ethnologue with the codes already in use in the earlier ISO standard. In addition, codes developed by Linguist List for ancient and constructed languages were incorporated. The result, which was officially approved by the subscribing national standards bodies in 2006 and published in 2007, was a standard named ISO 639-3 that provided unique three-letter codes for over 7,500 languages (ISO 2007). SIL International was named as the Registration Authority for the maintenance of the standard, which it did in a function that was separate from Ethnologue. Since the adoption of ISO 639-3, it has been the editorial policy of Ethnologue to follow ISO 639-3 in determining what linguistic varieties should be listed as languages. Each edition of Ethnologue has reflected the updates to the ISO 639-3 inventory of languages as of January of the publication year.

In a revision of the standard that was adopted in 2023, all the former parts of the ISO 639 family of standards were united under a single ISO 639 standard (ISO 2023). Changes to language codes are made by the ISO 639 Maintenance Agency, which consists of nine representatives from organizations that use the standard. Under the new scheme, SIL Global has been named as the Language Coding Agency for preprocessing requests for changes to ISO 639-3 and for publishing the most current version of the code set. Information about the ISO 639 standard and procedures for requesting additions, deletions, or other modifications to the ISO 639-3 inventory of languages can be found at the ISO 639-3 website: http://iso639-3.sil.org/.